1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the technical field of an authoring technique for optical discs.
2. Description of the Related Art
Authoring is to, during the manufacturing process of a master disc of optical discs, determine a format to be used in the application layers of the optical discs. Information having the format determined in the authoring process is called volume configuration information. The volume configuration information includes digital streams compressed and encoded according to the MPEG standard and a scenario with respect to the digital streams. The process of determining volume configuration information during the manufacturing process of a master disc of optical discs is called authoring. Conventionally, the authoring process has targeted read-only DVDs (generally called DVD-videos). However, one of the issues attracting attentions these days is how to perform authoring process with read-only Blu-ray discs (hereafter, they will be referred to as BD-ROMs) which will make appearance in the near future. Although distributing movie contents via BD-ROMs is more advantageous than distributing them via DVD-Videos, DVD-videos have overwhelming superiority over BD-ROMs in terms of being established and acknowledged in the society. Even after BD-ROMs have made appearance, it is unlikely that distribution of contents via DVD-Videos will keep on declining. On an assumption that current distribution via DVD-Videos will continue to be used in the future, production studios need to keep in mind distribution via BD-ROMs, in addition to the existing distribution via DVD-Videos. There is fear that burdens on production studios will be doubled because distributing each movie content will take twice as much labor.